Jennifer DeCesaro and Sarah Labowitz
The Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program explores how climate change and the responses to it are changing international politics, global governance, and world security. Our work covers topics from the geopolitical implications of decarbonization and environmental breakdown to the challenge of building out clean energy supply chains, alternative protein options, and other challenges of a warming planet.Learn More
For months, states have been voicing frustration with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s sluggish pace of spending from the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF), the federal government’s main pot of money dedicated to disaster response and recovery. The current administration is deploying three different strategies to slow-walk the flow of disaster dollars to state and local governments: stalling disbursements, delaying FEMA’s emergency response function, and suspending mitigation funding.
The DRF is almost empty, and on Wednesday, state officials learned they may be waiting awhile longer for FEMA support: A proposed short-term budget in the House of Representatives punts on how much money would be appropriated for the DRF. Instead, it refers to the previous budget, adopted in March, that provided $22.5 billion for the DRF and allows continued spending “up to the rate for operations necessary to carry out response and recovery activities.”
If FEMA were operating under its typical procedures, this would be a noncontroversial provision, and spending would continue as usual for responses to major disaster events, as well as ongoing reimbursements to state and local governments for recovery efforts from past disasters. But this year, FEMA is deploying funds from the DRF in an unusual way, essentially operating as if it’s in Immediate Needs Funding (INF)—meaning that the agency prioritizes immediate, life-saving and life-sustaining response efforts instead of meeting other obligations, such as reimbursing jurisdictions for their recovery activities stemming from previous disasters—without telling the states.
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